Philofisi...seems a new name....yeah, I combined the two Greek words, Philo and fisi to make this word...."Philo"means love and "fisi" means nature...so literally Philofisi means the love of nature.... Of course we all love nature but we like to enjoy it rather to understand it... Understanding nature definitely increase the pleasures of enjoying nature... This blog is dedicated to my love of nature.... so I will try to bring the topics related to nature in very light way....The reason that I chose the word of "Philofisi" is rooted in my understanding that we are returning to the age of naturalist not because that we get tired of specialization but because it provides enormous opportunities to uncover the secrets of nature and help us in better understanding of nature.... until now we tended to simplify or reduce facts to get the basic principles of nature...but Scientists are slowly realizing that nature cannot be grasped by simplified natural laws... It is why we see...Newtonian Physics....Quantum Physics...and Choas Physics are complementing each other.... Biologists likes to view the world with simplistic perspective of natural selection but it seems that they are also realizing that life is more complex that could be explained so easily.... Like Physics it needs to depart toward multi-mechanistic approach... I think this small introduction is not the place to discuss all these issues so I invite you to explore the blog and enjoy yourself :)

Friday, August 26, 2011

It seems that the world was in hurry in welcoming the age of reason and in the process has trashed some valuable experiences that current investigators are rediscovering them. The concept of the smartness is tied to quick judgments. A dictionary meaning reads smartness as, “Intelligence as manifested in being quick and witty”. Where are we quick in our judgments (the high show of smartness)? It turns out that most of us are quick in passing judgment about “Others”. Human tends to group quickly and establish a culture of norms that identify them from “others”, that have gone through the same processes and have established their own culture of norms and values. Certainly there come differences in the norms or values and hence provide a basis for the making judgments or developing the binary system of “wrong” and “right”. I have not to repeat that even within groups there are sub-grouping based on gender or social class. It is really common seeing girls passing judgments on boys or a social class passing judgments on others or one group passing judgments on other groups. In fact most of our jokes are based on these groupings when we like to laugh on what are “inappropriate” according to the norms of our social group.
In short, we have to distinguish between kinds of smartness and see whether we are smart in bringing quickly genuine solutions to genuine problems or we are quick in making judgments based on our established binary system of “wrong” and “right”?
It seems that it is not only in only in our quick judgments about “others” that the stranger laughs on us but he also laughs on our efforts to explain the human behaviors exclusively based on our theory of Altruism. In its July 30th Article, “Welcome, Stranger”, The economist magazine reports a series of recent studies that Human in general tends to trust the strangers and still continue to trust them even if they have gotten several times cheated on. The main reason is that, the overall benefit of trust is more than cost of the cheating. It is counterintuitive to the results of the traditional game theories (the results come from economic game theories in which participants are not sure whether they will meet in future to the strangers or not)
I can’t just pass over the first paragraph of the article. It really impressed me and it might be of interest to “others” (I intentionally put this word here),
“THE extraordinary success of Homo sapiens is a result of four things: intelligence, language, an ability to manipulate objects dexterously in order to make tools, and co-operation. Over the decades the anthropological spotlight has shifted from one to another of these as the prime mover of the package, and thus the fundament of the human condition. At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?”
Though there is no need that go one by one to each of the causes of extraordinary success of Homo sapiens, as it is very clear to all of us that human evolved all these four causes to a level that they themselves need decades of education to be good at them. They are definitely not innate characteristic though the ability to learn them are innate (have evolved).
In subcontinent, it was a tradition for centuries (and to large extent still it is) that mountain people who are living on Himalayas (especially Afghans), come to plain areas during winter (when their lands are covered with snow) in search of work. As most of these people were unskilled so they were doing menial jobs. The people who live on plains are genetically aliens (Indian) to those who come from mountainous areas (mostly Aryans) so were not only culturally strangers but also genetically strangers.
Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Nobel prize laureate (1913) in literature of non-European origin (Bengali) has a short story by name of Cabuliwala/Kabuliwala (A fruit seller from Kabul) that illustrate the relations that these strangers make with people on the plains (Anyone who visits the plains of Sindh and Punjab now quickly notices that a lot of these people have settled permanently one plains and own their own lands and businesses). In the story the Cabuliwala makes a friendship with a Bengali (Little girl). He was bringing her gifts (almonds and raisins) and was passing jokes with each other. Cabuliwala was retuning for sometimes each year to his home and was coming back to continue his business of selling fruits over his shoulders. Once he fights with one of the residents who owed him money and had refused to pay and goes for 8th years in jail. When he was released from jail he comes to see his friend, The Little girl but her father refuses to let him meet her as it was her marriage day and then Cabuliwala says to the father of girl that he has also a little girl at home and The Little girl was always reminding him of his little girl and now that he sees The Little girl has grown up to the age of marriage it makes him realizes that his own little girl must also has grown up. The father of girl helps him to return to his home to see his own little girl…..

Here is a song from movie Kabuliwala,

It seems that there is no connection between the Cabuliwala and the innate nature of humankind in generally trusting strangers but in fact there are. Anyone aware of the whole process knows that most of mountaineers who were coming to plain were lending money to locals or selling items in hope that they will be paid in coming years.
In short, though groupings are common and people trust more in the people inside their groups but it is the human nature to cross the lines and break them. Evolution is just a line and human pleasantly break the lines… The complexity of Intelligence, tool making, language and cooperation are evident in themselves. Human is a subject of wonder for themselves………….

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The first time that I met a logician, I was really impressed by the convincing power of logic especially by its practical applications in life…Let me share one of his thought processes…..He said that ….his savings can buy him a cab and he wants to invest in cab business…. but because he is not familiar with cab business so investing in cab business, means taking a great risk…. Logic tells him to not take risk when he has just one chance….(if it fails then he doesn’t have the chance for a second attempt)…He continued, if I had saved enough money that I could buy two cabs then logic would allow me to buy one cab and see if it succeeds (In case it fails…he still has a chance for a second attempt…may be a business that he is more familiar with)….
Last month I met him again and he asked me, “Any update?”…”I don’t believe anymore in utility of logic in real life” and without waiting for his response I continued, “My experience of last few years is telling me that sometimes very small and negligible things, bring cascading effects on our lives that most of time are out of our control…. It has really surprised me that how others’ acts and decisions can change our lives….Despite of my resilience a lot of things have changed….” He agreed with me but we didn’t have the mechanism to explain the limits of the logic and cascading effects of chaotic events…. It was the first time that I realized the cause of universality and the varieties of the fortune telling business….Like majority of people I was believing that the sole reason for widespread practice of fortune telling are superstition…but when I learned about chaos theory and butterfly effects then it became clear that…the main reason is the unpredictability of events……….
It is said that Chaos theory is the third revolution in Physics after Newtonian Physics and quantum Physics… The butterfly theory that….In non-periodic events, small changes can cause unpredictable big changes…..beautifully explains not only events in personal lives but also big events in contemporary politics and also in historical events…..
The Arab Spring has not died yet, so the memories are still fresh…If you remember the Arab Spring originated by suicide of young Tunisian guy which then spread to armed and unarmed riots across Arab world namely, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Jordan and somewhat in Saudi Arabia….. Who could imagine that a suicide can turn into a revolution that turns upside down the geo-politics of a whole region…. The same is true in recent London riots…I don’t know if you remember the same sort of riots in Greece…
The most horrible butterfly effect was that of First World War…. The WWI was started by assassination of Archduke of Austria (Franz Ferdinand) and his wife by a Serb… This single event caused a war in which 70 million soldiers participated and more than 9 million people were killed….. Isn’t it insane? (Totally illogical that an assassination can cause the killing of 9 million people)…
The fact is the logic works and works very well in periodic events and it is the cause of most successful theories, innovations and technologies…and yet we don’t have the luxury of precision in a lot of deadliest natural events like earth quake, volcanism and Tsunamis and have very limited (in matter of weeks) capability in predicting atmospheric and oceanic anomalies like Hurricanes etc…Though all these events are natural phenomenon and follow natural laws…..The reason that our predictions are limited is because small and negligible changes in the beginning can cause big changes that make it too complicated for our formulas to grasped them at all…….
Coming to personal life…sometime small decisions, acts that we do not care much about change the course of our lives…and later on we say…what if I did it this way…I had a totally different life now….That is what I have heard too many times from most of the senior people that I know very well… Well, I have too many butterfly effects in my own life that makes me really puzzled (Most of them caused by very small things)….
I aimed to keep this Philofisi article very light (nontechnical and non-philosophical) so let me share how sometimes very small thing change even the lives of great people who change the fate of a nation but their own fates were changed by very very small things/events/acts….
The most notorious story is that of Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar, the Iranian emperor,
Agha Muhammad Khan was the founder of Qajar dynasty and he united Iran after becoming fragmented and expanded Iranian empire to her earlier borders by recapturing Georgia at North and Khorasan at East. He was shifted Tehran then a small village into world famous city by shifting his capital from Sari to Tehran. You will agree with me that he was really an extraordinary person when you learn about his life. He was captured when he was only six years old and was castrated at the same age in order to stop him of becoming the chief of his tribe. Though he was eunuch he became chieftain of his tribe. Later on he was captured again and jailed for sixteen years. After his release, he started a rebellion and defeated small monarchs and united Iran to establish the Qajar dynasty.
OK, I had to tell you, how a negligible event turned the fate of such an extraordinary person,
Agha Muhammad Khan was a ruthless emperor. He was famous in massacring the whole population of his opponents and people really feared him. During his military expedition to North, one night had a big water melon in his dinner. He ate half of the water melon and gave another half to the guards. The guards ate the other half (may be thinking that emperor doesn’t need the other half)…. Later in night, the king asked the guards to bring the other half of water melon. But the guards had already eaten the water melon. He became angry….. that how could guards dare to eat the water melon without permission of emperor? He promised to kill them on dawn. The guards have witnessed the determination and ruthlessness of the Agha Muhammad Khan so in the middle of night, they swarmed the emperor’s tent and killed him while he was sleeping :(

Monday, August 8, 2011

As it is the first article in Philofisi series so I tried to make it light and fun to read…hope you will enjoy it :)

My name is Khudadad…Did you notice? I have just a single name. In most systems, first and second names are mandatory….so when I have to fill forms, I have to repeat my name, Khudadad Khudadad or write it Khudadad FNU (First name is unclear)….. I asked an officer, “Why people have two or three names? Isn’t it weird?”…..”Why do you have a single name? Isn’t it weird?” he replied back….Well, the purpose of this short illustration was to show that numbers don’t really mean much in life...living is more an art than science…and art requires creativity not a solid knowledge of numbers…. I don’t know anybody who claims that he has a better life because he knows advance calculus then one who is only capable to solve algebraic problems….. May be you feel it hard to agree with me so I take the help of Samuel Butler….he says, “Life is not an exact Science, it is an art”……….You may say, “Well, no court in the world make its final judgment on the statement of a single witness”…. OK, if you don’t accept the weight of Butler then let me do some math of life……Let’s start by numbers, It is an axiom by Mark Twain who is a famous historian and knows very well the history of civilizations….
Mark Twain; “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen”……….(i)
Damn it! We can’t have infinite happiness as it is not possible to live a reverse life…The zeros added to the left add, nothing :(……..No worries, if we can’t have infinite happiness, at least we can have finite happiness, so let’s bring our next axiom,
Clarence Darrow; “"The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children"….(ii)
Oh no, our finite happiness is ruined by some of our closed ones…and the problem is that…we can’t live without them…..This is a common tragedy :(….If it is a common tragedy then it is not tragedy at all….It is the common things that help us solve problems…you add, subtract common numbers from both sides of equation or multiply or divide common things at both sides…Common things are self-evident so they don’t need to be proved……Common things are really blessings of life…..But I am afraid that not all agree with this strategy of solving problems….Thomas Carlyle falsify the approach of commonalities by his axiom,
“"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."….(iii)
It seems that all doors of happiness is closed…we can’t enter from opposite door (born at age of eighty) and by entering front door, our lives are ruined in two parts and we miss a lot of things we want so much ….:) But wait, sometimes kindness comes from places that we don’t expect…Perhaps it is because Probability is an undeniable part of mathematics…. Helen Keller the great blind writer is saying that though we miss a lot of things but miss because we don’t look at right direction,
Helen Keller, "When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us"….(iv)
So if numbers are not much of help in life then we shouldn’t look long at this door…we have to move to the next door…Geometry!! Yes, maybe it has an open door for our happiness…Ralph Waldo Emerson, has an axiom about geometry of life,
"It is not length of life, but depth of life (that matters)."……(v)
Yay, it seems that at last we got the right axiom….Ralph Waldo agrees with us that numbers have nothing to do with life…it is geometry of life that matters….The Depth of Life…wait, I think we are not done yet…as we don’t know what makes the depth of life and how much depth one’s life can have?....That is a serious problem…..Let’s simplify things….I think we need to do some calculus…break down the problem into fractals and then integrate them… Frank A. Clark, is also agrees with my approach….
“"Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things."…….(vi)
Now that we know that it is the little things that are fractals of life…we can solve the problem easily….But there are too many small thing….From where to begin? And which fractals are the most important ones? No worries as William Wordsworth has figure out the fractals of life,
“"The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love"……(vii)
Now let’s integrate these fractals…. David Jordan has integrated these fractals…Let’s see what is the result…and how much depth one’s life can have?
"Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for"……(viii)
Aha, at last we got it…it is not the length of time but what it is that we live for is important and the depth of one’s life depends on real value of the thing that he/she lives for…….
Do you think that my conclusions are fair and right……..Well, you can’t rely on my calculations as I am not good at mathematics….you have to calculate for yourself….Steve Job the founder of Apple, is also agreeing with me,
“"Your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Cheers :)

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About Me

I try to describe “ME” honestly; you Better not to trust the honesty
of this description because I didn't take oath of honesty while writing it.....

PhD student, lecturer, Fulbrighter, member of toastmaster club (You may
add knolers if you like more spice…though I have already spiced it a lot ….woooooof),…..
abuses his brain by thinking a lot (ouch!), finding it free of any charge and
always available, ………have worn out his finger tips by writing a lot (ouch!),………
has weaken his eyes sight by sitting long hours in front of computer screen (Noch
noch),…….. Some early morning go running (if got no idea),…….. Likes to wear casual dresses (Don’t have the patience for shopping and doing laundry…needs
to be pushed),…….. loves creative works either in sciences, philosophy,
literature, arts or psychology and sea food (yummy), ……….likes to take a nap at
mid-day- though time is not kind to him- (~lazy~) legitimizes his act by saying
that Einstein was sleeping 9.5 hours a day (Zing!),………. Does a lot of experiments
with cooking (the only one who eats his cooking is himself, so no worries)……., believes
that Allah gives ten times for each good deeds so tries to score a lot (Pitifully
Greedy), ………….believes to not hurt any heart (Doesn’t care much about his own
heart; shameful), ………..Reacts forcefully to injustices (Calm down man, you are
not judge), ………..Deeply loves nature (The lure of field trips attracted him to
Geology; He just boasts and I don’t think he has the stomach to spent five
years on HMS Beagle as Charles Darwin did),………. Likes open and grassy places
and rivers (But needs protection from sunlight….his skin burns fast as thin
papers have shown the matches), ……………Loves listening Indian music (He got some good
neighbors that tolerate his loud music; It is predictable that someday, someone
might lose his temper and break his laptop for playing nonstop music),………….. Believes
in humanity (not sure that where apes cultures end and human’s begin… But can’t
blame Jane Goodall, Edward O. Wilson and Charles Dawkins for this obscurity),…………
Believes in spirituality (Got tired of religious hatred, discriminations and
bloodshed),…………. believes that all nations whether small or large should have their
own free homeland (UN assembly have space for more than a thousand nation…and
it is not big a deal to make it more spacious and diverse…Got five stars for
this notion),……. Doodles a lot (and then tear down his mAsTeRpIecIeS…Dreamy),……
He is talkative (But never open his lips unless you start talking and show a
friendly attitude to him…Better to speak up otherwise he will bore you with his
silence), ………Never have been good at plays (but likes to play cricket…though
never liked to watch others’ playing….funny), Pets; he likes Roosters, Ducks
and Horses (He never owned a horse),…….
Dogs; no way, he got this crazy idea after reading Bokhari’s essay about dogs
at class 10th that you never know when dogs stop barking and starts
biting…When dogs are on walkways, he walks on streets……. I don’t think that he
deserves a whole page of description so better to stop here (Though he claims a
whole book is not enough…Let him boast though…………)